At 4:10 PM -0500 2/18/02, Dan Brickley wrote:
>On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Pat Hayes wrote:
>
>> >> The term ontology may be unfamiliar to many readers of
>> >> this document.
>> >>
>> >> That seems superfluous. I suggest striking it.
>> >>
>> >> This notion of ontologies comes from Artificial Intelligence,
>> >> where ontologies are used to allow heterogeneous systems to
>> >> exchange and reason with information.
>> >>
>> >> I'd suggest either citing specific work in this area
>> >> or striking the reference to Artificial Intelligence.
>>
>> I agree. In any case, you could equally well cite data modelling
>> languages, say; and the basic ideas go back way before AI if you want
>> to get historical, at least to the 1940s and maybe the 1880s.
>
>On the prior art front, it wouldn't do any harm to chuck in a nod to
>http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/categories.html
>
>...though wouldn't want to overstretch the historical parallel or we'll
>find ourselves listing everyone who has every thought about cateogies,
>taxonomies and formal models.
>
>Dan
>
I'd like to suggest we have no specific references (and thus strike
the AI one), I'm open to some sort of on-line repository for
citations where we point the reader in this document, but I think we
want to make it clear that there is a long history to this, and if we
start trying to cite all relevant work we will never finish. A note
that there is much work we are not citing, and a pointer to web space
where that list is/grows is fine. Most W3C documents don't have
much in the way of citations, and this document seems to me a
particularly inappropriate place to start.
-JH
--
Professor James Hendler hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies 301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab. 301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler